Calling UK tenants – it's time to push for Berlin-style rent controls / GUARDIAN.

A luta contra a especulação / gentrificação / globalização ... Londres é apontada por Berlim, ao determinar um limite ao aumento das rendas, como o exemplo a NÀO seguir : “We don’t want a situation like in London,”

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Calling UK tenants – it's time to push for Berlin-style rent controls

Berlin’s authorities, seeing the effect of spiralling rents in London, are bringing in controls to ensure the city remains habitable for all. We must do the same

Dawn Foster / Wednesday 3 June 2015 13.08 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/tenants-uk-berlin-rent-controls?CMP=share_btn_fb

Another win for London’s residents: we’re now influencing global housing policy. On 1 June, Berlin began enforcing rent controls, stipulating that landlords may not charge over 10% more than the local average rent for new tenants. The reason? “We don’t want a situation like in London,” Reiner Wild, chair of the Berlin Tenants Association told the Guardian. The pride! London’s housing system is now so completely dysfunctional its reputation transcends borders.

Berlin’s residents and politicians made it clear: the rent controls, which mimic ones already in place for existing tenants, are absolutely necessary if the city is to continue being habitable for all. When Ed Miliband gingerly suggested during the election that tenants might need more rights, and rent controls could be a way of achieving that, he may as well have called for the mandatory sacrifice of first-born babies, for all the paroxysms of the right and the landlord class.

Rent controls have a fairly long tradition, with the most prominent having been set in New York. During the first world war, rents were controlled across the United States: New York maintained the controls from 1943 onwards to stymie rapid inflation in the housing market. Those controls have been phased out over the decades, with fewer than 2% of apartments in New York now rent controlled – but just under half are rent stabilised, which prevents the landlord from raising rent above a set rate, and requires them to renew tenancies. This means that at least some people can continue living in the city when, without such regulation, landlords might have hiked the rates long ago.

London’s housing system is now so completely dysfunctional its reputation transcends borders

There are examples a little closer to home of rent controls being used too. In Britain, for example. Until the Housing Act 1988 was passed, Britain had a far more regulated housing policy with regards to rent. Between the second world war and the late 1980s, policies fluctuated, but tenants could appeal to a rent tribunal if they felt their rent was unfair, and local authorities had rent officers who looked into rents that were raised above the stabilised rate.

But with the introduction of buy to let, Margaret Thatcher clearly felt it was important not to leave any avenue unexplored when it came to the decimation of the housing system. Tenant rights were trampled by rampant capitalism. As a result, many people simply can’t afford to live in London and the south-east, even on average salaries.

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A number of my friends recently graduated from university, a few years later than I did. Fine, upstanding citizens, they decided they wanted to contribute to society and become teachers and nurses. While ordering their graduation gowns, they were also scrabbling for jobs. The problem, they found, was that jobs in London, where all their friends lived, in the city they’d known for many years, offered salaries that were certainly in line with nationally agreed pay scales – but too low to live on. The issue was exorbitant, and fast-escalating rents. To live within even an hour’s commute of the London jobs on offer was impossible for a couple on starting salaries.

The strain of this phenomena was shown a few days ago, when NHS trusts were upbraided for paying agency fees for nurses they couldn’t afford to recruit. If nurses don’t live nearby, agency staff are drafted in. With hospitals struggling to recruit, care suffers, and costs rise, undermining care even more. You can argue that if people can’t afford to live in a city, they simply shouldn’t. But only if you’re then happy to visit a hospital with no nurses, or have your child’s school close for lack of teachers. If cities are not for all, they cease to function.

It’s always worth listening to who shouts the loudest against rent controls. Unsurprisingly, it’s landlords. Naturally, they’re not in favour of a policy which means the profit they cream off from tenants is regulated. Chris Leslie, landlord, Labour MP, and shadow chancellor, mused last week that he felt Labour hadn’t been kind enough to landlords. Nonsense. It’s worth noting that fewer than 2% of people in Britain are landlords, on average they have 50 times as much wealth in assets as their tenants, and could happily cope with a drop in income. For such a small proportion of the population, they’ve been protected far too long. It’s time the UK’s hard-pressed tenants clamoured for the same rights as their Berlin counterparts.